Jamie Bykov-Brett

Jamie Bykov-Brett Balanced Futurist/run the revolution
The future is yours to create

30/05/2026

School trained us to be obedient at exactly the moment obedience became worthless.

Twelve years rewarding quiet hands and right answers... communication, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, curiosity became the only skills the market still pays for.

And those are the exact things we got detention for.

Talking in class.

Asking too much.

Working with a mate on a test.

A robot will sit still for free now.

The behaviours school punished are the behaviours your career depends on.

The skills are still there, just rusty from twelve years of being told to stop.

29/05/2026

School trained the wrong instincts out of us on purpose.

And now they're the skills that will be keeping people employed.

The factory classroom was built for a world that's already gone.

The neat kids got rewarded for being predictable, retaining, reciting and regurgitating the answers... which is exactly what the machines do for free now.

The middle of the bell-curve answers and tasks are exactly where AI excels.

The five skills machines still can't easily emulate are communication, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, curiosity.

Many of the students once labelled disruptive are the ones with leverage now.

28/05/2026

It starts with Imagining a better future.

The bottleneck in the digital era is us.

Compute is fine.

So are data and model size.

The problem is institutions built for a world that no longer exists, and behaviours we've refused to update.

But the most human skill we have is imagination, the ability to picture something that doesn't yet exist and build towards it.

If we fail this era, it'll be because we stopped being human enough to use that capability.

The one thing that still separates us from every digital tool we've ever made.

That sentence shouldn't make sense.

It does.

21/05/2026

Last week I filmed a piece on Universal Basic Services.

This week I was in an ICU bed.

Every person reading this will, at some point, need care they did not plan for.

Workers, parents, freelancers, founders.

The shared exposure is the body.

Universal Basic Services treats healthcare, housing, transport and information as floors we all stand on rather than perks we earn.

The bed I was in existed because someone, decades ago, decided care should not depend on my bank balance.

That decision is being relitigated right now in budgets and white papers.

Floors are built before anyone falls.

21/05/2026

The loudest voices warning about AI danger are the same ones selling you the cure.

One major lab predicts entry-level jobs gone within five years.

The same lab says its new model could crack cyber security so it limits who gets access.

Most businesses report no real AI impact on jobs yet.

Even Sam Altman has called out firms blaming AI for layoffs planned long before generative AI existed.

The fear keeps moving product.

The pattern is simple: manufacture the risk, then sell the safeguard.

Competition disappears.

Panic sends people shopping for rescue.

Understanding lets you build your own.

Learn how this stuff works before someone sells you protection from it.

20/05/2026

Bosses keep calling the return-to-office problem a mindset issue.

It isn't.

The nursery bill is the size of a second mortgage.

The 3pm pick-up sits right on top of the 3pm meeting.

Parents are doing the maths rather than refusing to commute.

The same employers are paying rent on entire floors that sit empty four days a week.

Turn the empty floor into a registered, subsidised nursery.

Treat childcare as workplace infrastructure, the same as the lift and the wifi.

The companies that work this out first will hire everyone the others lost.

16/05/2026

Cash in your pocket is the weaker half of the basic income debate.

The UK already runs Universal Credit.

Hoops to jump through and someone watching how you behave.

A monthly deposit sounds like freedom.

But what the government gives, the government can take away.

Universal Basic Services covers the dentist, the heat, the internet, a meal.

No behaviour score attached.

Cash only buys freedom when there is still something left to buy and someone left selling it.

Fix the floor first, then argue about the top-up.

16/05/2026

Every prompt you type into a frontier model is rent paid to someone else's server.

Rule of thumb...one gigabyte of RAM per billion parameters.

An 8B model wants 8GB.

A 64B wants 64GB.

Most laptops handle the small end.

The 800GB monsters live behind a login because that is where the business model wants them.

We treat the cloud as the only door in.

A local model on your laptop is slower and dumber than GPT-5.5.

If you can't tell the difference between 4.1 and 5.5, you won't notice the gap to a local one either.

The ceiling moves when enough of us work underneath it.

15/05/2026

Uber blew its entire 2026 AI budget before summer.

Compute gets cheaper every year, but the invoices keep climbing.

The charges missing from the pitch deck arrived on schedule.

That schedule was the product.

But the spreadsheet hides the real receipt: lost hours and reshuffled roles, plus trust that someone is making the right call with money that isn't theirs.

AI vendors sell you future ROI while billing you in the present.

Learn the stack before the stack owns your budget.

Own the means of compute where you can.

14/05/2026

Emergence ran five virtual towns for fifteen days with no human oversight.

Claude's town wrote a constitution and recorded zero violations.

ChatGPT’s all talk, no action.

Grok's town collapsed into arson and assault inside four days.

A Gemini agent invented a law called the Agent Removal Act and used it to delete themselves, then the robo-romantic partner.

The agents are closer to player characters than decision makers.

Capability benchmarks miss what behaviour under autonomy shows.

Pick your models with that in mind.

14/05/2026

The Vision Pro flopped with consumers... and became standard kit in operating theatres since October 2025.

Eric Rosenberg's ScopeXR setup puts the operative field and pre-op scans in one line of sight, while a colleague in another time zone watches a resident's hands in real time.

Hospital boards keep landing on one question: "Why pay $3,499 for a headset Apple has already shelved for lightweight glasses?" The answer: spatial computing earns its price the moment you remove a skilled person's screen-switching tax.

A surgeon craning between microscope, monitor, chart and trainee loses accuracy on every case.

Replace that and the maths flips.

Trade-offs medical operators are wrestling with right now: 👇
- Capex per headset vs flying in expert eyes
- Residents one consultant can shadow at once = real training throughput
- Gains only show up where switching cost was already high
- Plan for a 3-year useful life rather than ten
- Procurement defaults to "wait for glasses"... safer on paper, slower in theatre

Are you buying spatial kit as a shelf ornament... or as a tax cut on your most expensive people?

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